The prospect of a bigger paycheck has my head spinning. I am thinking about all of the things I want to do in the house – new sink and faucet in the main bath, new or at least re-surfaced cabinets in the kitchen, some more fencing in the back yard, and new blinds on all of the windows. I know I will not suddenly have a pot of extra money from which to spend, but the idea that updates to the house will be easier to afford is a lovely thought.

I have been looking at Moen faucets every time I go to one of the home improvement stores here in town. I have an idea of what I want and have been watching the prices. Of course, once I got it in my head about the styles I thought I liked I went to my friend Bekah’s house and saw the new faucets she installed. Now I am giving some serious thought to getting one like hers. I think most brands call it a single-handle country pump style faucet. You do not get a very forceful stream of water, but it looks so pretty.

I know that Florida is not the only place you have to be super careful about fleas and ticks if you have pets that go outdoors, but we sure do have to deal with it for more months out of the year than a lot of other locations.

I learned the hard way about being very careful with what I put on my pets to deter fleas and ticks. Although I never skipped a month, I did buy some off brand medications that may or may not have been up to par. Despite keeping a schedule on heartworm medication, my older Greyhound did end up with heartworms. Now, as old as she was and as mild as her symptoms were, there was no need to worry with painful or expensive treatments. She was diagnosed and the vet told me she would die of old age before she died of heartworm related complications.

When I buy Frontline and other pet medications now, I make sure I am getting them from a reputable dealer who is not apt to substitute out of date products or products made in dosages that are meant for countries other than the United States.

For some reason, the angle of our screened in back porch does not catch the breeze the way the rest of our yard seems to. So, although sitting on the porch is usually pleasant, if I step out onto the patio I get a much more delightful breeze, even in the hear t of summer.

Since flying insects will soon be an issue here, the screened in porch is an important feature of outdoor recreation in Florida. I’ve considered getting one of those yard tents for the patio so we can roll up the canvas flaps and catch the breeze from all four sides of the structure. That way, I can just use the outdoor furniture I already have on the back porch and we can enjoy a better backyard experience for just the price of the tent.

I’m not sure I am using the right word, though. As I have been searching online for the product I want, I’m coming across more of the huge party tents one would rent for a wedding. I am looking for a canopy or gazebo type structure that goes up and down easily, but with screened sides.

Even though people in Florida can use their yards all year, I think most of us still fall under the charm of spring and summer. I know I have been thinking a lot more about how to make the yard look inviting than I did over the winter. This past winter I was more focused on pulling up the dead crabgrass so the real grass would have room to grow back in this spring.

Last month we brought home an array of solar lighting fixtures for the yard. We put some motion-sensor solar lights in the house out back and bought some very cute strings of star-shaped lights to put in the ficus trees out front. We even got some lanterns that throw off star and moon patterns when they come on. And yes, they are all solar. We found a specialty store down in St. Pete that was having a big pre-season outdoor lighting sale. I wish I had grabbed more of the light strings, because once the prices went back up they became slightly cost prohibitive.

One of the warehouse discount stores down the road has all the usual suspects right now, like hanging lanterns and garden lights that you stick into the ground with pegs. They are all solar and the prices are great, but they just don’t have that unique vibe like the little star lights we sprinkled throughout the trees. There is just something about the slightly blue cast of a solar light that blends into the peacefulness of night while still illuminating the world around us.

I don’t usually complain about the way I feel. I don’t. I’m not one of those people with an aching back and sore feet. Why? I sleep on a good mattress, exercise, and wear Birkenstock shoes to work. And before you chime in with a comment about how unattractive Birks are, just remember that I work at a high school and there is not a soul there I need to look pretty for ? That would be gross. Plus, my shoes mean I can walk and walk and walk and walk, and my legs and feet NEVER hurt. Never.

Anyway, I think my bed is about to the point where it needs replaced. It is a super mattress, but it’s a twin and was always meant to be used for the time being,. My amazing mattress is a King and it is in my storage unit. I dream about that bed. It is a Springair and it rocks, absolutely rocks.

My sister has a sleep number bed, though, and is always singing its praises. She has me curious. I can admit that. My super-bed, the one in storage, might be amazing but it is still the bed I shared with my ex husband so although it is comfortable – it is saturated with bad memories. I can see the justification of the consideration for a brand new bed when I move the next time.

I want to continue to be the person who gets a great night’s sleep. So, you can bet I will spend what I need to spend to replace my mattress with the best possible bed on the market. I owe it to myself to at least consider a sleep number. Hmm, maybe y brother-in-law would give up his spot for a few nights and let me test theirs.

It has been many years now since our last bad hurricane season. Of course, you would never know that from the way the home insurance companies bellyache and go groveling to Tallahassee begging to be allowed to raise rates 60% and more. They talk like Florida is costing them all of their profit year after year, when a storm has barely hit here since my daughter was a baby.

Anyway, back during that last bad hurricane season my mom’s fences blew down. Her neighbor on one side went halfsies with her to put the fence back up along their shared property line. The neighbor on the other side put up a white fence. That still eaves the two front sections and one curbside of the yard unfenced. The house is on a corner lot, so it actually has five sections that need fencing.

As much as this neighborhood seems private, the lack of a fence in the backyard means I do not like my daughter to play outside alone, I always make sure I am fully dressed when I am out there, and I feel like the world is watching when I am bent over sweating overt the flowerbeds. I want to splurge soon and have the remaining yard sections fenced, but my mother says she prefers not to bother.

Granted, most of the money you spend in a fencing project is the cost of the fence installation. I could go to Home Depot and buy the sections and a post digger and a bag of concrete and set the fence myself, but I would probably do a flimsy job. If I could recruit a few friends it might work out better. In the end, I know that paying someone is the best way to go because if they are putting in fences day after day, they more than likely have the technique down to an art. That is way it kills me that I am not stronger and handier around the house. Living without a man in the house can be bliss due to the lack of conflict and negative make energy, but at times I wish there was a handy guy in the other room who could go out and complete talks for me. Of course, when I was married my husband was absolutely useless ant home projects anyway, so I am not sure what I am bothering to complain about.

The mainstream media is finally comfortable using the word recession. I’ve been saying recession for a long time now and, in fact, I am comfortable using the word depression as well. Take an honest look around you. The jobless rate is frightening. Prices for food and other necessary items are going up instead of coming down. Housing prices might be more affordable for purchase now, but millions of people are losing money when they sell – or just plain losing their homes. Rental prices for homes and apartments are still sky-high and are not coming down to meet the demand for lower cost housing.

A depression could not be far off. Now, think about stories you have heard from people who were alive in the depression era. My grandparents are mostly dead, but I do have one grandmother who is still around to tell me stores of how she and her family survived. Also, my parents were both raised depression-era parents and were instilled with values of frugality and self sufficiency. Thank goodness they passed those values down to me.

Up north we always kept large gardens. My mother canned fruits and vegetables. I see now the value of growing as much of my own food as possible and “putting it away” for later use. I am ready to learn how to can. However, I live in Florida now and I have to re-learn how to grow a successful food crop. I know I am going to have to have good soil brought in. I will need to build a tarp to make sure my crops do not burn up in the sun. I will need to learn about planting season here and what foods do the best.

Fruit is an easy option to start. We have a large yard and although the grapefruit tree was cut down a few years back, the star fruit tree we trimmed to the ground this year will be back within two years. We have lemons and oranges in pots that are ready to go into the ground. We have apple trees of a variety that grow well in the Florida climate. I have looked online and found suppliers for Blueberry and Blackberry plants that should do well here. All of these things can be canned and will also provide a good deal of fruit to be eaten fresh.

What is one of the first words you think when I ask you to describe Florida? You might have said floral or tropical or relaxing, but when it comes right down to it most people would use the word “hot”.

Yep, it gets pretty hot in Florida. And while we don’t actually hot some of the high temperatures that the southwest and the northeast experience in the summertime, our hot season lasts a lot longer.

You adjust to the heat down here. For example, I don’t really have a winter wardrobe. I can wear summery clothes most of the year. Most homes around here have ceiling fans in pretty much every room. You learn that painting your house a dark color is rarely a good idea. And, you take seriously what sort of window treatments you use. What you use to cover your windows can make or break things when it comes to your energy bill in the summer.

While I want to keep the white hot sun from heating up my house via my windows, I also want to make sure my home looks great. Solar Shades come in all sorts of styles, including very trendy Roman Shades. You can make sure your room looks just right and at the same time keep your energy costs down, block UV rays, and insure that all important insulation that ultimately means your rooms will be more comfortable – even in the searing heat of an early afternoon in July.

The last two homes I have owned had security systems. I very quickly learned to rely on them for that extra sense of safety at night, when I was home alone, or when we were out of town. I thought that when I moved to my current home I would not miss a security system, because before those two prior homes I had now lived with one anyway.

I was wrong.

I absolutely feel the lack of a security system here, even though this is historically a safe neighborhood and I know most of my neighbors. We also have two neighbors closely who frequently host the sort of parties that means a hundred drunken people using our streets as a social hangout. Plus, with every month that passes in our current economic times, I am hearing more and more about the increase in robberies. People are becoming desperate. Well, I don’t want their desperation to mean the loss of my belongings or danger to my family. home security is worth quite a bit to me.

On ADT’s website, I see that I can get a system installed for under $100, after rebates. Not bad. After that, all I need to fuss with are the monthly monitoring costs. It’s worth my peace of mind.

A garden is a wondrous thing. My mother always had a garden in our backyard. Actually, she had several. She would plant a vegetable and herb garden. She had one side of the house where she cultivated amazing roses. She also put several amazing flower gardens in at different places all over the front and back yards. I think she got her green thumb from her father, who always put in acres of vegetables and came from a long line of hobby farmers.

The focus of my fascination when it comes to gardens has always been when people come together in urban spaces to create a community garden. Not only is that garden going to brighten the neighborhood, but it also facilitates relationships between neighbors that may not otherwise spend time together.

I’ve been reading tonight about one of the coolest grant projects I’ve ever heard of. It’s called the Fiskars Project Orange Thumb grant. What this grant does is provide up to $1000 in green goods and up to $1,500 in Fiskars gardening tools for garden projects in the United States, Canada and Australia.

Gardens or gardening projects that focus on community involvement, neighborhood beautification, sustainable agriculture, or horticultural education qualify – and that includes schools! As soon as I read through the site I immediately thought of my daughter’s school and the HUGE courtyard area they have in the middle of the campus. Some of it is bricked, but there are these patches of grass that are perfect for a school wide gardening project.

Of course, not only future projects are eligible. You can apply for the grant if you have an existing garden or gardening project that qualifies. I just printed out the main page of the site to send to the school and I want to encourage all of you – my readers – to apply for projects in your community. The application deadline is February 17, 2009 so you have plenty of time. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that others at my daughter’s school will be as excited about this as me.

I am one of those people who is not afraid of spiders. In fact, I like them a lot. Therefore, I feel like I need to be educated about the ones that would pose a danger to me if I were to pick them up and be bitten. I was looking at an article by G. B. Edwards of the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services and he says that only two main types of venomous spiders are in the state: widow spiders and recluse spiders.

Widows can be native to Florida. Of the four species of this type of spider, three are native. The fourth species has been introduced. It turns out that widow spiders are not native to Florida at all, but there are three species that are occasionally found here.

Since both of these kinds of spiders generally stay where they are no easily seen, the article recommends that you wear gloves when doing things like lifting firewood or reaching into a storage box or your BBQ grill.

A widow’s bite releases venom that acts systemically and moves through your lymphatic system. You might notice “intense pain, rigid abdominal muscles, muscle cramping, malaise, local sweating, nausea, vomiting, and hypertension.” The symptoms can last three to five days if not treated, but treatment is easier than you might think. Not only will an anti-venom work, but so will calcium gluconate – with can be obtained at the drug store inexpensively.

Recluse spiders are hunters and more aggressive than widows, but still only usually bite humans when trapped against the skin, like when you roll over onto one in bed or put on clothing where one is hiding. Their bites cause symptoms within two to four hours, generally making a swollen, painful blister at the bite site that is reddish in color and surrounded by blue. This is called a ‘bull’s-eye’ pattern. If it turns purple, the skin around the bite is becoming necrotic, which means it will eventually turn black and the cells will die, leaving a pitted, scarred area.

When I lived in Gainesville, we had a lot of brown recluse spiders in our wooded yard. We often found them on our screened porch. Alachua County is one of the places the brown recluse is often found. We resorted to putting out a brown recluse spider trap, because my daughter was a toddler at the time and liked to run about touching things and exploring the environment. Of course, I still felt safer being right with her so I could monitor her actions.

Over the last week I have been trying to make time to go through the things I have here at the house and sort them into items we will keep and those things we can donate to the Hospice. I have already taken over bags of my daughter’s old shoes, unwanted toys, costume jewelry, a bread maker and the cat’s carrier.

I still need to go through my daughter’s clothing and the things out in the garage. I bought all new Samsonite luggage last summer, so I want to go through all my travel bags and donate the ones that older or too heavy for current airline guidelines. Surely someone can use the bags for local travel. They are all still in such great shape.

The things in the storage unit will get the same treatment, but I will wait until we buy the house and move for the final time to do that.

I’ve really cut back on what I buy in the last couple of years. If I really think about it, I have everything I could ever need to run a house without purchasing much of anything else. Of course, I will need to buy new appliances and consumables every so often, but there is no reason to bring in any new decorative items or kitchen ware into my home. All that serves to do is make the house so crowded that I end up doing what am doing now – donating the old things.

My frugal outlook on life keeps me from buying something new simply to replace another item that is still in usable shape. For example, the only reason I bought new luggage last summer is that the airlines all put new luggage restrictions in place and I found that my older, heavier suitcases weighed so much that I would have had to severely limit what I packed inside of them. I bought new, lightweight luggage and we were able to pack everything we needed and still be under the weight limit.

I call this my Spring Cleaning in January. Sorting and donating is also inspiring me to do the deep cleaning and such around the house. We have such amazing weather this week, too. It just seems like the right time.

When I was at my best friend’s house a couple of weekends ago, she had her new massive television delivered. Several years ago when they built their house, they had grand idea for the open great room upstairs and they are just now getting around to furnishing it.

We sat there on the couch after she had it delivered and she asked me what I would do with the room. I know she is making built-in shelves to go all around the TV and they are adding some columns to the back of the room to visually break it off from the hallway and the stairs. I think they are also going to have heavy, velvet curtains made in the back of the room that they can use to close off the room.

I told her about some home theater seating I had looked at myself recently. You can buy leather recliner style chairs with one or two arms. I suppose you buy the first with both arms and the others with just one arm, so that when you sit them right up against one another side-by-side, it is sort of like movie seating. I think she had just buying a new couch in mind. ? If had all that room to just use as a room to watch TV and movies, I would make the most of it. They already have a living room and family room downstairs. May as well make this a mini theater.

I’m happy with my recent career change, but I have to admit that sometimes I miss my old industry. Although I worked as the director for the art department for my old company; that company was a manufacturer and I absolutely loved the science and technology surrounding the business. These days, you’ll actually find me reading a magazine on plastics or architecture before I’ll pick up a book on graphic design. I love the prospect of new information – the learning process and the feeling of acquiring new knowledge.

My latest informational passion is architecture, as evidenced by my mention of preferred reading material above. It started when I was still married and we had grand plans to build our dream home. I started getting interested in design and construction trends, the move to green materials, and how the industry was compensating for the shortage of some raw materials and their accompanying price hikes.

I started seeing a trend in metal roofs. They last longer, they look cool, and the ideas is that it is sustainable. I saw that the trend had moved also to a point of design – the decorative touches you see around the house. Perforated metal is turning up as lighting covers, ceiling and wall panels, balcony guards, and more. It’s modern looking, clean, easy to maintain, and long lasting. Sheet Metal Stamping can provide a plethora of cool ornamental patterns.

Of course, that is just the decorative use for stamped metal products. More traditionally you see the product in appliances (think your dryer drum), automotive equipment (grilles and guards), medical equipment, and more. I’m endlessly fascinated that a product that has so many industrial type uses has trended toward something that’s in high demand for decorating your home.

When I think about having tools in the house, I think of Craftsman Tools. I’m pretty sure I just never thought any other way.

My dad always bought Craftsman. My grandfathers both used the brand exclusively. I inherited a lot of tools from my maternal grandfather and yes, they are all Craftsman. Besides the fact that their quality is undeniably good, my family felt safe knowing that if one of the tools broke EVER, they could simply go to Sears and have it replaced for free. Of course, you have to make sure the item you buy is actually under that warranty. More often than not, that warranty served us quite well.

I know Christmas is around the corner and I should say that I am shopping Sears for Craftsman Tools to buy for my dad, but in all actuality I am the one I would be buying for this Christmas! I’m back to have my own household and not replying on a husband. I have a lot of the tools I need, but I still have a small wish list of items I want in order to have my little tool bench completed.

Since ALL Craftsman tools are on sale right NOW, I’m thinking about using the birthday check my dad just sent me to work my way through said wish list. So, with all the Craftsman C3 Tools on Sale, there is a C3 19.2 volt Drill/Driver that has my eye. It generally sells for $119.99 and is on sale now for $89.99. That’s a decent savings on a quality drill that I know will last longer than my marriage did!